“You have?”
asked Mack. “Well, who is it? Have you told the cops?”
Jerry shook his
head. “I can’t tell the cops. I’m not supposed to tell anyone at all, and I’m
only telling you because I can trust you to keep quiet. They’ve kidnapped my
son, David. They’re holding him hostage somewhere, so that I’ll give myself up
to them. They want me, because of what I know. That was why they tried to kill
me in the first place. And that’s why they tried to kill Admiral Thor-son out
at Rancho Encino. Admiral Thorson directed the same operation during the war
that I was involved in, Operation Appomattox.
Olive said,
“You’d better come inside. This isn’t any kind of a problem to be talking about
on the porch.”
Jerry was
exhausted. After he had spoken to Nancy Shir-anuka, he had waited for hours for
Gerard Crowley to come around to her apartment. But by four o’clock in the
morning, Gerard still hadn’t showed, and Nancy, bringing Jerry tea and anago
mushi she had prepared for him herself had told him softly that it was useless
for him to wait any longer. It was the first time that Jerry had eaten steamed
egg custard and eel in the small hours of the morning; and the way his stomach
felt now, he hoped it would be the last. But he had been afraid to refuse
Nancy’s hospitality.
If he was ever going to have to
cultivate Nancy and strengthen her confidence in him.
Nancy was as
terrified of the Tengus as he was; what she urgently needed was a friend she
could trust.
Olive made
coffee while Jerry sat on Mack’s broken-down sofa and explained what had
happened. Mack and Maurice listened intently, and then sat back and sipped
their hot coffee and tried to look as if they were thinking extraordinarily
hard about some way of rescuing David and destroying the Tengus.
“You really
believe in these things, these Tengus?” asked Mack. “President Truman believed
in them; enough to drop the first atomic bomb the world had ever seen.”
Maurice said,
“Let’s, face it, Mack, I’m strong. But the way those murder victims were torn
to pieces, I couldn’t do that. That takes somebody superhuman. I couldn’t rip
your leg off with my bare hands. I couldn’t even start. I might feel like it
but I actually couldn’t do it.”
‘‘Maurice,
those are very comforting words,’’ said Mack. “But what do we do now? What can
we do? Should we do anything at all? I really think that Jerry should go see
Sergeant Skrolnik. I mean it. He’s a cop, but he’s all there, and and he’s only
as mean as he needs to be.”
“Supposing the
kidnappers found out I went to the police?” asked Jerry. “If they can tear a
heavily guarded hospital apart, for the sake of trying to kill one poor old
retired naval officer in a coma, what the hell do you think they’d do to David?
A young, live, alert witness to everything they’ve been doing?”
“What if you do
give yourself up to them?” asked Olive. “What guarantee do you have that they
won’t kill you both?”
Jerry put down
his coffee mug and rubbed his eyes. “No guarantee at all. I don’t know whether
I’m dealing with criminals or mystics or madmen. Nancy Shiranuka may be
double-dealing me, although I can’t for the life of me guess why, or what she
could conceivably get out of it. I just don’t know what to do. It might have
been easier to understand if I’d been able to talk to Gerard Crowley.”
“Why not talk
to him now?” Maurice suggested. “If he’s involved in any kind of business, he’s
probably in the phone book.”
Olive clapped
her hands. “You see, he’s not all muscle. Good thinking, El Krusho!”
Mack picked up
his tattered telephone book and thumbed through it. “Here you are,” he said at
last. “Gerard F. Crowley, Crowley Tobacco Imports, Inc. 2029 Century Park East.”
Jerry said, “You really think it’s worth a shot?”
“Why not?” said
Mack. “You don’t have anything to lose. You might get your son back. Look, I’ll
dial it for you.”
It was just
nine o’clock, still early for a Los Angeles businessman to be at his desk, but
Mack got through to Francesca right away, and Francesca said guardedly, “Yes,
Mr. Crowley’s here, who is this?”
“Tell him it’s
Mr. Sennett.
Mr. Sennett of 11 Orchid Place.”
There was a
silence, then Francesca said, “Hold on for just a moment, please,” and switched
Mack to a holding tape of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Jerry looked
quizzical, but Mack held his hand over the receiver and said, “I’m holding.”
At last, a
tired voice said, “Mr. Sennett?” and Mack passed the phone across to Jerry.
“Mr. Crowley?”
said Jerry testily. “I was waiting at Nancy Skiranuka’s apartment for you last
night. Apparently you were supposed to show up there, but you didn’t.”
“Well, I was
busy,” replied Gerard, obviously cautious. “I’m sorry if you had a wasted evening.”
“Not evening.
Night.
I waited all goddamned night. I’m still waiting, to
hear what you’ve done with my son.”
“Mr. Sennett,”
said Gerard, “we’ve got ourselves a critical difficulty here.”
“You bet your
ass we’ve got ourselves a critical difficulty,” snapped Jerry. “We’ve got more
than that. We’ve got kidnapping, extortion, blackmail, and murder. That’s what
we’ve got. And for some reason this is all connected with what I did in the
war, in Japan. I want to know what, and why, and what the hell I’m supposed to
do to get my son back safely.”
“Mr. Sennett, I
don’t really want to talk about this on the telephone,” said Gerard. “Apart
from the fact that you might be tape-recording this conversation, other people
could well be listening in.”
“What other
people?”
“Believe me,
people you wouldn’t care to meet.”
Jerry said,
“All right. Let’s meet. Do you know Zucky’s,
Fifth
and
Wilshire?”
“I’ve heard of
it. I can find it.”
“Meet me there
at twelve, for lunch. I’ll be sitting in the far corner. I’ll leave my name at
the counter.”
Gerard
hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Okay, I’ll be there,” and put down the
phone.
“What did he
sound like?” asked Olive. “Suspicious?”
“A little,”
said Jerry thoughtfully. “But he was much more cooperative than I would have
expected. If you ask me, what happened last night at Rancho Encino was a
foul-up. They were, trying to murder Admiral Thorson, right? And they failed.
He’s still alive. Better than that, he’s out of his coma. What’s more, the
police have killed the Tengu and recovered the bodies of two Japanese, which
means that they could now have a pretty straightforward lead to
whoever
it is who may be organizing this thing–whatever
“this thing” may be. Nancy Shiranuka is convinced that her employers have been
trying to do a whole lot more than create a corps of expensive killer
bodyguards. Mack here may have come up with a good idea when he suggested that
some cranky Japanese outfit is trying to take revenge on American war heroes.
Maybe he’s right.
But, whatever–something’s.happening,
something dangerous and volatile and much bigger than it looks.
In fact,
I think it’s so dangerous that Gerard Crowley actually wants to talk to me
about it.
All I can do is
wait
and see.”
“If you’re
meeting him at Zucky’s, try the blintzes,” said Maurice.
T
he van drew up by the side of the hot and dusty highway, its right
rear tire flapping with a sudden blowout. The young Japanese switched off the
engine and sat back in his vinyl seat, blowing out his cheeks in exhaustion.
Commander Ouvarov, sitting beside him with his corncob pipe gritted between his
teeth and his .45-caliber Colt automatic resting loosely on his lap, turned his
head and stared at him with an exaggerated lack of sympathy. “Well?” he said.
“There’s a
spare in the back.” Yoshino said, “I’m very tired, Commander. Can’t we rest
now?
Driving for eight hours.”
“You were hired
as a driver, what do you expect?” Yoshino wiped his forehead with the back of
his hand. “Please, Commander.”
Commander
Ouvarov checked his watch. They hadn’t made bad time, considering they had been
driving at night. They had left Encino at high speed; but instead of making a
conventional getaway they had driven just four or five miles to a nearby Howard
Johnson’s, where they had eaten, cleaned themselves up, and gassed up their van
for a long, hard journey. Even as they sat here now, eight hours later, by the
side of the highway which runs just south of the Superstition Mountains, a few
miles east of Phoenix, Arizona, two police officers were questioning the
manager and the waitresses at Howard Johnson’s, trying to determine which way
the fugitives had been heading, and how much of a head start they had managed
to get.
Commander
Ouvarov squinted northward through the August heat haze, towards the broken,
uncompromising outline of the mountains. It was only ten o’clock in the
morning, but the temperature was already into the low 90s. “We can’t waste too
much time here, Yoshino,” he said. “If we don’t make El Paso by evening, we’re
going to be in big trouble. That customs officer at El Paso is a close personal
friend of mine; I did him a favor a few years back.
He’s the only
man who’s going to let us through that border without any questions, no matter
what.”
Yoshino resignedly
opened the driver’s door and stepped down onto the dusty roadside. There was no
traffic in sight for two or three miles in either direction. He walked around
to the back of the van and loosened the spare. Commander Ouvarov stayed where
he was, his automatic on his lap, listening to the radio. “And now it’s 91
degrees at Sky Harbor, with a prospect of 111 to 113 degrees by noon.” He
knocked the dottle of his pipe out, and meticulously refilled it with Old
Geronimo tobacco. He had smoked the same pipe tobacco since 1942.
He felt the van
being jacked up beneath him; but he remained where he was, his arms folded,
calmly smoking. He felt no guilt about having made a run for it. He’d had his
doubts about Mr.
Esmeralda and
Gerard Crowley right from the very start.
Too many sharks in
the same pool for Commander Ouvarov’s liking, too many people with difficult
pasts and uncertain futures.
And as for those peculiar Japanese, with
their black silk masks, and those tortured Tengus...
well, the only good Japanese as far as
Commander Ouvarov was concerned was
a disemboweled
Japanese. He hadn’t asked too many questions; he’d done whatever they’d asked
of him; but the whole plan was ill conceived, badly managed, amateurish, and
too damned strange.
He took off his
hat and mopped his sweating forehead with his handkerchief. It was a pity about
Nancy Shir-anuka, he thought. The sensations that Nancy could give to a man,
selflessly, purely for the erotic artistry of it, were disturbing enough to
haunt him forever. When he was lying on his deathbed, he would remember what
she had done to him with a Mexican bead necklace. His last words before he was
carried upward by the angels would be, “Nancy, the beads... ” At least, he
fondly imagined they would.
After a quarter
of an hour, he felt the van being jacked down onto the road again. He called
out,
“Yoshino?
You through now?” but he couldn’t be sure if
Yoshino had heard him.
He opened his
door and swung himself heavily out onto the roadside. “Yoshino?” he called.
Yoshino had
been packing away the flat. He came around the van, wiping his hands on a rag,’
his face and chest glossy with sweat.
“All done now,
Commander.
We can go. Make El Paso by dark.”
“Good man,”
said the commander. He turned his back on Yoshino. And that was fatal. The next
thing he knew, there was a blinding crunch in his back, as Yoshino drove the
sharp end of the van’s tire iron between his ribs into his guts.
The commander
let out a sharp, barking shout. His hand scrabbled around behind him to tug the
tire iron out. But suddenly his nerves went, his coordination froze, and he
pitched sideways into the dust.
His brain still
worked, but the tire iron had severed vital nerves and left him paralyzed. He
watched in glassy, jack-rabbit helplessness as Yoshino bent down and picked up
his .45, hesitated for a moment, and then disappeared from view.
Japanese, he
thought to himself. Never trust
a Japanese
. All these
years I’ve preached nothing else. All these years I’ve been warning them. They
never listened. They went their own sweet unconscious way while Datsun and
Toyota and Sony and Toshiba took the dollars from under their noses, the bread
from their family tables. They’re wily by nature, the Japanese.
Treacherous by birth.
All these years I’ve said so, and today
I forgot my own damned warning; today I neglected my own damned advice. And
here I am; helpless and dying on a hot highway in Arizona.
Yoshino climbed
into the van and started the engine. Lying on his side by the road, Commander
Ouvarov shouted, “No! Don’t leave me!” But Yoshino had no intention of leaving
him. Instead, carefully watching Commander Ouvarov in his side mirror, he
shifted the van into reverse and began to creep back toward him, until
Commander Ouvarov could feel the hot gasoline breath of the exhaust on his
neck, and smell the oil and rubber and hydraulic fluid.
With all the
precision of an expert driver, Yoshino backed the van up until its rear tire
was resting against the side of Commander Ouvarov’s head. Commander Ouvarov
could feel the wheel pinching his hair, and he wildly tried to heave himself
out of its way. But his paralysis was complete. His brain thought heave, and
nothing happened. His arms remained tangled side by side on the road; his legs
seemed to have disappeared altogether. The only feeling he had left was in his
face and his head, resting against the gritty pavement.